Two separate but related news items caught my eye today. First, Comcast has acquired social networking technology provider Plaxo in order to integrate social network-like features that let viewers share programming, among other things. Second, Turner Entertainment Networks announced a new plan to index content within television shows so that contextually relevant ads can be served during subsequent commercial breaks.

Beyond holes in Turner’s plan that I’ll get into in a minute, these are moves that signal an interest among television providers to learn from what is working on the Internet. As Marc Adreessen asserted yesterday (see past post), television and other established media have to look to software to benefit from the innovation cycles that aren’t possible with their relatively fixed format mediums.

What Plaxo could do for Comcast involves more potential for growth than what will be possible at the onset. The idea is to integrate a system that taps the social and viral qualities of social networking to drive consumption of television content and ads. Plaxo already works with Comcast in some markets to provide software that ties together its triple play products.

Future integrations based on this software will include things such as interfacing telephone calls and messages through the television. More value added integrations are further off, such as greater pull based content delivery and web-like interaction with product search and communications. Here IPTV will have an architecture advantage over cable, but Comcast is moving in the right direction.

On to Turner, it’s likewise moving in the right direction, though its plan is to mashup contextual ad placements with traditional push-based 30 second ads, which kind of misses the point. In search, a great deal can be gleaned about intent from an isolated query. Television ads are much more passive. Just because I sat down to watch a particular movie, it doesn’t mean I’m interested in a specific product mentioned half way through that movie which may or may not have any thematic connection.

Contextual placement in other words is much more effective when intent can be determined, which is hardly the case here. This will improve with some of the aforementioned moves towards IPTV and it’s capability for behavioral targeting, product placement and “telescoping” items of interest for more information or purchase (think cooking shows and home improvement).

It’s good that TV execs are thinking differently, but it will take a few iterations and lots of other moving parts (user behavior, IPTV deployment ect.) before they get it right.

Internet legend Marc Andreessen waxed positive about social networking and VC opportunities for the next five years during a packed luncheon at the Think Tomorrow — Today conference. Without spending too much time talking about his own social networking venture, Ning, he asserted that the decentralized “many to many” media world we now live in has created 40 million to 50 million early adopters.

The user empowerment that the Internet offers has also inverted adoption cycles to start first with consumers, then enterprises. It has traditionally been the other way around, he said, citing examples like blogging and social networking as consumer driven apps.

In a walk down memory lane, Andreessen further pointed out that we’ve seen about one killer app per year, starting with the Web browser (his brainchild circa ‘94) then moving on to Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, Google, Flickr, MySpace, Skype, etc.

“If you look at the common thread, these were all easy-to-understand tools that relate to how people live their lives,” he said. “They also had to do with communication and connecting people in new ways.”

Entrepreneurs and VCs should keep this frequency and set of factors in mind, he said, because we can expect about a dozen killer apps over the next 10 years. The iPhone is one place where some of this innovation will be channeled, given the widely anticipated 3G model and subsequent generations that will be smaller, faster and cheaper.

“It’s the first mobile device that software developers can write to and that people can use,” he said.

The second part speaks to a point we and others have echoed regarding the ease of use and appeal that will finally bring mobile search into the mainstream. The resulting market size of the iPhone and competing devices will feed back into the innovation cycle, creating more incentive to develop products. That plus the development-friendly environment Andreessen referenced, will bode well for innovation.

Other important places this innovation will happen include ad targeting. Stepping back, Andreessen contended that despite online fragmentation, ad revenues are declining in nearly every form of traditional media. The only place where it is rising is the Internet and video games. With this, ad targeting will continue to improve and drive growth — not only because of advertiser interest in following users online, but also because of Moore’s Law.

“The technology for ad serving and targeting is getting better and better because it is software,” he said. “This development cycle is antithetical to what media companies were built to do. Traditional media isn’t based on code, but on fixed standards. The format for delivering most television content today was invented in the ’40s.”

The innovation behind these ad serving technologies will drive the overall online ad pie from 20+ million today to about 100 million in the next five to seven years, he said. And an important piece of this puzzle will be ad networks, which can benefit from a network effect as they grow — seeing exponential returns from incremental traffic and distribution.

“A big battle over the next few years will be around ad networks,” he said. “AdSense has a lead there but there has to be about 200 different ad networks out there that are targeting in different ways.”

Today, I’m at ThinkPanmure’s Think Tomorrow –Today VC summit in Half Moon Bay, California. As Where 2.0 is happening as we speak on the other side of the hill, some attention to location awareness has been paid here as well.

A panel discussion this morning on the convergence of fixed and mobile telecommunications stressed the opportunity for enterprise applications that tap wireless LANs to track people and inventory where GPS signals deteriorate (read: indoors).

Beyond the enterprise, many consumer local search opportunities begin to come into focus where purchase decisions are driven primarily by proximity to categories, stores or SKUs. Call Genie’s Garry Galinsky stressed this point at Drilling Down on Local a few weeks ago.

NearbyNow focuses on mobile shopping search (primarily SMS) based on close proximity to stores (intra shopping mall). These types of searches could gain more traction as location enabling technologies are integrated and generally improve to the point of more mainstream appeal.

Broadly, the importance of location targeting for both SMB and national advertisers seems to be gaining more attention lately. Skyhook (see previous post) is a leading technology enabler, while Placecast is an ad network focusing on location-based targeting. This will be an important area of development.

Skyhook Wireless announced a series of partnerships that bring location awareness to online applications. These include Krillion, Yahoo! Fire Eagle and CitySquares, to name a few. They’ll each use the location awareness of PCs and laptops (via Wi-Fi signal) for different forms of geotargeting and smarter content delivery.

This is a step beyond mobile apps, where the discussion of location awareness usually focuses (Skyhook’s iPhone app profiled here). The saturation and adoption of Wi-Fi has reached the point where there is an opportunity to pinpoint and target nodes on a wide-scale level, with much more accuracy than that afforded by IP address.

This brings capability for opt-in location-based services in a number of use cases (think laptop-equipped business travelers looking for somewhere to eat). Local search already exists in a lot of these use cases, but location awareness enables opt-in and personalized preferences to which users are actively alerted when geographically relevant.

In other words, it makes local search smarter and opens the door for lots of new applications for these partners and more that will likely follow.

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Skyhook Director of Consumer Products Ryan Sarver will speak tomorrow at Where 2.0. Check it out if you’re at the show.

Here is the highlight reel from the last week in TKG Blogging. Click below to read each post in full.

Kill the Innovators: San Diego U-T Lays Off Online Leaders
These are tough, fast-changing times for newspapers, and many of them are taking severe measures to get back on track. Sometimes, it means putting the innovative online guy in charge of print too, as Bay Area News Group has done with online advertising head David Prizer. But sometimes, it means consolidating power under the old print hands that believe they need to “own” the online efforts because that is where the action is. (read more…)

Truvo Goes Mobile in Belgium
European Directory Publisher Truvo (formerly World Directories) has extended its mobile search product to the Belgian market. The product utilizes mobilePeople’s Java-based Liquid Maps platform, which powers several mobile search platforms being rolled out by directory publishers in Europe. (read more…)

Yell Launches Media Portal
U.K. directory publisher Yell has launched a new Web site designed to help agencies and media buyers evaluate its multichannel products. Yell additionally has dedicated a team of specialists to work directly with agencies. Large accounts are widely viewed as a channeling segment for Yellow Pages publishers, and more tools and resources need to be devoted to this segment to make a better case that the full suite of directory products offers good value to large, national accounts. (read more…)

AdBrite Teams Up With Live Nation
Ad network AdBrite has announced it will power a new ad management dashboard for concert promoter Live Nation. The eFan Finder application is an extension of the existing relationship between the companies that placed geotargeted event ads throughout AdBrite’s network of 50,000 sites. This now brings campaign management and reporting down to the band manager level. (read more…)

AgendiZe Powers Local Video
AgendiZe announced today from the EADP conference in Spain that it will partner with Videoagency to power its video ads with call to action features. This brings AgendiZe’s signature click-to-call and save and share features (profiled in a past post) to video for the first time. (read more…)

MojoPages Claims Traction; Announces Deals With Key Players
Despite some traction by sites like Yelp — OK, specifically Yelp — the hybrid IYP/rating-and-review segment remains something of a question mark in the industry. It remains to be seen whether such sites can attract a large number of frequent reviewers and users — and not just recent college grads and/or mothers. It also remains to be seen whether they can cross the chasm out of restaurants and bars into the gold mine of services traditionally mined by Yellow Pages. (read more…)

Selling SEM to SMBs: Service Must Come With Sale
Elizabeth Gage of PCM International posted a well thought out blog on the challenges small and medium-sized businesses face when purchasing search engine marketing campaigns, either on their own or through Yellow Page publishers. After reading her thoughts on the subject, I couldn’t help but realize that the focus of current SEM efforts has been on getting the appointment and making the sale. Gage’s post, however, highlights the challenges after the sale is made. (read more…)

Spot Runner Raises $51 million
Online video production company Spot Runner announced today that it has received $51 million from Legg Mason, Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), Grupo Televisa, and Groupe Arnault/LVMH. The company will use the funding to continue growing its capacity to deliver video advertising, both online and off. These investments are also strategic in nature, involving a collaboration of international media assets with Spot Runner’s video production platform. (read more…)

Idearc Gets Boost From Q1 Results
At this writing, Idearc Media’s stock was trading higher (up about 28 percent at noon Eastern) after an earnings announcement that shows the company has managed its costs well enough to grow EBITDA, while its revenues continued to slide. (read more…)

New Look, New Campaign From Yellowbook
Yellowbook has unveiled a new television ad campaign, replacing the kinda cheesy Kung Fu ads (sorry, David Carradine, you did what you could) with a much slicker campaign that focuses on promoting use of Yellowbook’s online directory (which is also sporting a new look and feel, modeled closely after its sister IYP Yell.com). (read more…)

European Directory Publisher Truvo (formerly World Directories) has extended its mobile search product to the Belgian market. The product utilizes mobilePeople’s Java-based Liquid Maps platform, which powers several mobile search platforms being rolled out by directory publishers in Europe.

The downloadable search app will pull listings from Yellow Pages (Pages d’Or) and White Pages (Pages Blanches), news from hln.be, weather from Meteo, Web search, and of course ringtones and wallpapers. It will also come with save and share functionality as well as other calls to action like click to call or e-mail. It will be available in French and Dutch.

MobilePeople was just acquired by local search platform provider LocalMatters. The two should be a powerful combination, given LocalMatter’s installed base and the growing hunger among European directory publishers to launch or improve mobile search apps.

For Truvo it’s a continuation of its mobile product growth, and in line with its stated intentions to develop non-print sources of ad revenues in earnest. Among directory publishers worldwide, it has been a leader in that sense.

Ad network AdBrite has announced it will power a new ad management dashboard for concert promoter Live Nation. The eFan Finder application is an extension of the existing relationship between the companies that placed geotargeted event ads throughout AdBrite’s network of 50,000 sites. This now brings campaign management and reporting down to the band manager level.

“We’ve been working with Live Nation for a year and they want their local constituents to know how well all this stuff is working,” says AdBrite VP of Marketing Paul Levine (who previously ran Local for Yahoo!). “This works at the age-old challenge in local advertising of tangibility. We’ve built a system to have local marketers see where their ads are.”

This essentially plays off one of AdBrite’s differentiators as an ad network in that it offers site level transparency. In other words, beyond traditional analytics, its dashboard indicates to marketers the specific sites where their ads can be found. Too often in online ad campaigns (SEM and display), ads are fanned out to dynamic ad units ruled by whatever targeting metric is in play, but it’s difficult for advertisers to actually go and see their ad.

This is arguably more relevant for SMBs than national advertisers. The latter have dedicated marketing people who are happy enough with bottom-line analytics. But smaller local businesses sometimes need the intangible ROI that is the warm and fuzzy feeling you get from seeing your ad. This is another reason why online video is showing an early relevance to SMBs compared with SEM and other online ad media they’ve been pushed.

A full comprehension of local importance seems to be rare for ad networks. Placecast is doing some interesting things, and AdBrite has the benefit of Levine’s local perspective. Today’s deal is evidence of this, and it has good implications for similar deals in other verticals where there are national or regional entities with localized constituents (auto dealer groups, real estate agencies, hotel chains, franchise-based corporations, etc.).

“We have exclusivity with Live Nation in events but we’re interested in forming relationships in other verticals where this same kind of dynamic exists,” says Levine. “You can see the same thing in retail, insurance, auto, fast food or any of these categories where it’s a national organization with local interests. We’re having lots of discussions now.”

AgendiZe announced today from the EADP conference in Spain that it will partner with Videoagency to power its video ads with call to action features. This brings AgendiZe’s signature click-to-call and save and share features (profiled in a past post) to video for the first time.

Mixpo provides similar functionality, which is a strong proposition to advertisers that want to take advantage of the direct response capabilities of video that is served in a local search context. This is the “lean forward” mode of video viewing we’ve examined in the past.

This is a logical step for AgendiZe, whose call to action buttons in local listings bring social and personalization capabilities to IYPs. As video is increasingly integrated in these venues, AgendiZe is following suit. Its existing relationships with Yellowbook.com and Yellowpages.ca, among others, could also help Videoagency and the combined offering gain IYP channel relationships.

Videoagency currently distributes mostly on search engines, utilizing a video SEO tool in combination with increasing video favorability in search engine results (universal search). Like Spot Runner and TurnHere, the company relies on an outsourced network of 4,000 filmmakers to shoot and edit content for SMB videos.

The company is yet another in this quickly growing segment of SMB video vendors. Differentiation will be vital if and when we reach a shakeout in the space, and actionable videos like these (and Mixpo) are one point of differentiation. Check out the demo here.

During DDL last week, I was able to finally meet Palore CEO Hanan Lifshitz. We profiled Palore a year ago, when it was a browser overlay that enhanced search engine results with personalized icon-based notifications of business attributes (pet friendly, kosher, vegetarian, etc.).

Since then, the company has changed its model to utilize all the data it was scraping from local search sites to get this info. From that have come useful data sets that the company is now structuring in various ways to be used by destination sites (licensed), or as research tools for marketers.

The company is starting to release some of the data to wet the market’s appetite, including a simple comparison of restaurants that have Web sites across major metros (see below). Other specific drill downs would be interesting to see, such as who is providing menus, table reservation features, and video (a comparative look at volumes of video clips across IYPs would also be interesting).

The point is that there are lots of mashups of local search data that are possible and potentially of interest or promotional value to destination sites, as well as local marketers and industry watchers. I’m meeting with Hanan again next week, and will find out more about the data he can scrape, aggregate and structure in interesting ways. More to come.

Online video production company Spot Runner announced today that it has received $51 million from Legg Mason, Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), Grupo Televisa, and Groupe Arnault/LVMH.

The company will use the funding to continue growing its capacity to deliver video advertising, both online and off. These investments are also strategic in nature, involving a collaboration of international media assets with Spot Runner’s video production platform. According to the release:

DMGT is one of the largest and most successful media companies in the United Kingdom with interests in national newspapers and related digital operations, local media, business and financial information, exhibitions and radio. In addition to the United Kingdom, it has operations in Central Europe, the United States, Canada, Asia, the Middle East and Australasia.

“Spot Runner is transforming the way media is optimized and targeted across a broad spectrum of advertising mediums. As a media company with one of the largest bases of local advertisers in Europe, we look forward to collaborating with Spot Runner and applying its model to our business, particularly as we continue to innovate in connecting advertisers with local audiences,” said David Roddick, commercial director of Northcliffe Media, the local media division of DMGT.

Grupo Televisa, S.A.B. is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world. Televisa operates four broadcast channels in Mexico that have consistently maintained a sign-on to sign-off audience share of more than 70 percent. Televisa also has interests in the production of pay-television networks, international distribution of television programming, direct-to-home satellite services, cable television, magazine publishing and distribution, and radio broadcasting.

“Spot Runner has demonstrated its ability to create meaningful value for media companies by bringing new categories of advertisers to television and other media and by helping larger companies invest their budgets more intelligently and effectively,” said Alfonso de Angoitia, executive vice president of Grupo Televisa, S.A.B. “We feel Spot Runner’s model has great applicability to the Latin American market and we’re excited to explore new opportunities to partner.”

Groupe Arnault/LVMH is the world’s leading luxury products group, with a portfolio of over 60 prestigious brands including Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Donna Karan, Sephora and TAG Heuer.

“The global media landscape is undergoing a sea change. For advertisers to be effective, they will need to completely shift their thinking about how media is targeted and distributed, and how creative can be versioned for multiple audiences,” said Antoine Arnault, head of communications for Louis Vuitton. ”Spot Runner is the clear leader in this area. As one of the largest advertisers in the fashion category, we’re very enthusiastic about the prospect of working with them to capitalize on these transformations.”

Spot Runner has seen lots of action lately, emblematic of the activity level in the local online video space. This includes the recent acquisition of the GlobeShooter production network and that of local online advertising firm Weblistic.

Funding in this round also included existing investors Allen & Co., Battery Ventures, Capital Research and Management, CBS, Index Ventures, The Interpublic Group, Tudor Investment Corp. and WPP.